OK, something is up here. a real peon starts getting ideas of his own and feelings. if drummer boy lives though this, he might become a turn coat. IF he lives. …. could this be that Best’s human persona just roll up a horde toon to play if bandit and best are out of the picture for now?

the NPC AIs don’t get this introspective about themselves and the world. only really higher end AIs or players think this much. that tipped me off, we should keep an eye out for NPCs that seem to think or act out of the norm.

in a follow up idea, i wonder of drummer troll boy will not just quit the horde, but join the peace keepers on the alliance side? Gravey shows that it can be done, with him being a dwarf and all.

The Five are capable of “conversing” with NPCs, interacting with and even influencing them in ways normal players cannot. Player characters in physical proximity to the Five become capable of doing the same thing. (See chapter 15, page 22) But little drummer boy here had thought bubbles and moral crises of his own while he was still in distant lands. Therefore, since he had these internal thoughts without contact with the Five, he’s not an NPC. He’s just a player, playing for the Savage Races, who’s into RPing.

Role-playing allows you to imagine yourself as a different person — or really, to express different aspects of your personality, some submerged. That’s more the case if you role-play more than one character, and try to make them distinct from each other.

Payet Best wasn’t introspective. What little we saw of his sepia-world player didn’t seem introspective — but that person pointed out that he had multiple stage personas.

So I could quite well believe that this is an aspect of Payet Best that normally goes understated.

I actually have a crazy theory of my own. Remember at the end of chapter 15, HR ordered supllies for 2 more immersion tubes. So, what if those were finished without showing us and “Penk” is a new, immersed player? As for who the other one might be, perhaps Kur’ik? Just like Penk she’s shown to have thoughts of her own, which is – for me at least – hints at them being more than just NPC’s.

Nope! Just one of those times where we’re all on the same page about how things should go. We get a lot of those kinds of happy accidents because of how much time we spend all making sure we have the same idea of what’s going on.

Not really intentional, but it’s probably more unconscious sychronisity. The cog is of course coming from the mashed axe-tank, and Penk of course is just a little cog in Harky’s war machine. Nice how those things just come out that way.

I sort of concur. I think this is pretty much the best way Bibli’Oh could have been killed, while still seeming realistic (as opposed to, say, his death buffing every elf – on the other hand, Bibli’Oh’s spirit could become a new arrow for Gravy now, it seems).

War, war never changes. It starts with the best of intentions, to end a percieved wrong, but ends with the worst of results, more hatred, and more wrongdoing, to be corrected in another war, a future war…

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